The Georgia Straight has been an integral part of life in Vancouver B.C. for over 43 years. In addition to feature stories on everything from politics and social issues to local underground musicians and artists, every issue includes details on...

Staff Sgt. Ryan D. Maseth was electrocuted while taking a shower in Iraq. His death, along with at least a dozen other soldiers who have met the same fate, is a tragic, and chillingly literal, symbol of what writer Naomi Klein calls "the Shock Doctrine." In her book of the same title, Klein argues that for modern corporations, wars and other disasters are just part of the business model.

Klein may be called a conspiracy theorist because she argues that greedy multinational corporations, rightist think tanks and neo-liberal governments are the designers of many international economic disasters, but even skeptics will be impressed by the weight of statistics, documentation and first-hand quotes she assembles to make her case.

More by Brian Lynch

It was only natural that tonight’s Olympic closing ceremonies would feel like a strange, flaring, echoing dream. The walk to B.C. place for the 5:30 p.m. start was only a couple of hundred yards from where I’d just seen Sidney Crosby score one of the biggest goals in Canadian hockey history.

The best athletes in any sport are praised for making the difficult appear easy — as Mario Lemieux did while gliding past opponents. But figure skaters also have to make what they do look like something profound, sincere, wrapped up in a moment of genuine emotion.

This penetrating analysis by Helen Jefferson Lenskyj, a Toronto sociologist and activist, remains a classic for how thoroughly it exposes the secrecy, elitism, hypocrisy, corruption, and lack of accountability of what she calls the “Olympic industry”.

With the publication of Egg on Mao: The Story of an Ordinary Man Who Defaced an Icon and Unmasked a Dictatorship, Denise Chong has revived interest in the moral heroism of Lu Decheng and his friends Yu Zhijian and Yu Dongyue.